A group of Eastside business and political leaders briefed Sen. Patty Murray on Tuesday about plans to urbanize the Bel-Red corridor, hoping the three-term lawmaker can bring federal dollars to the cause.

The chances are promising with Murray being a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and chair of the group’s subcommittee on transportation, housing, and urban development – all of which are major components of the Bel-Red redevelopment plan.

Another D.C. insider who is likely to pull hard for the Bel-Red plan is former King County executive Ron Sims, now serving as deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Murray said the Obama administration needs a shovel-ready project to become the national poster child for transit-oriented development and sustainable growth. The Bel-Red plan fits that bill, she said.

“All the ideas people are talking about and thinking about, you’re actually doing it,” Murray told a panel of planners, business leaders, and local-government officials on Tuesday.

Murray is good at finding money for local projects – almost to a fault.

The Seattle Times reported in 2007 that she created $17.65 million in earmarks that forced the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard to buy boats they didn’t ask for and expressly didn’t want. The beneficiary was Edmonds shipbuilder Guardian Marine International.

Murray also doled out $6 million to a Redmond company for battle gear that the Army had already rejected as flawed, the Times report said.

But not all the senator’s earmarks are of the “bridge to nowhere” variety. She pulled in $44 million this year to fix the Howard Hanson Dam, for instance.

If Murray is indeed the “Queen of Pork,” as the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense once named her, it only bodes well for her chances of landing money for the Bel-Red redevelopment.

The city of Bellevue has rezoned the industrial corridor for mixed-use development, and Sound Transit is making plans to run light rail through the area. Planners envision the corridor filling up with mid-rise buildings that include shops, condos, apartments, and offices.

This type of “smart growth” planning aims to fight sprawl by concentrating housing, jobs, and transit development in designated neighborhoods.

The city has already identified $582 million in local investment from public and private sources to support the plan, and it is ready to begin work on new road connections that will bring traffic to and from the area.

First comes the Wilburton Connections projects, which extend NE Fourth and NE Sixth streets from downtown to the emerging Wilburton neighborhood – another part of town that the city has targeted for an urban makeover.

The city also plans to build a new corridor that would stretch NE 16th Street westward to the hospital district, creating extra traffic capacity in the Bel-Red area.

Plans are also in place for the first mixed-use project along the Bel-Red corridor. Wright Runstad’s Spring District will transform the Safeway distribution plant on 124th Ave. NE – along with surrounding property – into 16 city blocks of mid-rise buildings and parks, with light rail running through the middle.

Wright Runstad president Greg Johnson called Bel-Red Road a “corridor of national significance,” and said a bit of federal investment could go a long way in making the neighborhood transformation successful.

Work on the Spring District could begin as early as 2013 if economic conditions improve, Johnson said.

At around 900 acres, the Bel-Red corridor is one of the largest areas in the nation targeted for transit-oriented development.

“This is a scale where it becomes very meaningful,” said Bellevue transportation director Goran Sparrman.

Bellevue City Council member Grant Degginger had a simple message for the federal government at Tuesday’s briefing: some people are ready to plan, but we’re ready to build.

“As we develop grants for the future, we need to do it in ways that say ‘Let’s not just plan, let’s do some things,'” Degginger told The Reporter.

Murray’s briefing took place at the new Seattle Children’s Hospital on 116th Ave. NE in Bellevue. The facility, which opens July 20, is the first new development to take place along the Bel-Red corridor since the city made plans to transform the area.